KAVECON Case Study

Kavecon

KAVECON is one of Korea's most popular K-pop streaming platforms, enabling hundreds of thousands of users to watch live performances and concerts together, as well as virtual meet and greets with some of the world's favorite artists. Initially launched in 2020, KAVECON's services were widely adopted by users not only in South Korea, but across Asia, leading to significant growth year-over-year.

Business Challenge

With COVID-19 bringing many different market changes, live streams of concerts and performances of the world's most notable artists have been prevalent since 2020. Initially more akin to Netflix with live streaming capabilities, KAVECON quickly realized they needed to pivot to adapt when live performances halted around the world, and demand for virtual events skyrocketed.

Concentrating development and resources on concerts to meet the demand of the K-pop fandom, KAVECON's first focus was providing an improved user experience with low latency across all facets of their business, notably chat. "We discovered that other services already offered two-way communication between artists and fans, and messaging is the most viable solution for driving engagement. That's when we knew we needed chat to best capitalize on the market," states Jesang Park, KAVECON CEO.

After only five concerts, KAVECON was searching for a vendor that could handle the scale of their ever-growing user base and not only meet, but surpass their business needs. "Driving rich engagement with users was the end goal," says Park, "the missing piece was a vendor that could move fast and effectively to keep up with market demand."

Why Kavecon Chose Sendbird

KAVECON selected Sendbird for a breadth of reasons, the first being regionality. "We preferred companies that had a presence in Korea, and when we discovered Sendbird, we realized they had the means to grow our community and the capabilities to meet the scale we were looking for," states Park.

While there is typically a pre-sale period of 7-20 days for virtual concerts, sales typically shoot up drastically closer to the actual date. KAVECON desperately needed a solution that could handle sudden spikes in DAU, as well as be able to quickly and easily change design. With Sendbird's flexible UIKit and 9 AWS regions for real-time chat, these concerns were quickly put to rest.

However, KAVECON needed to implement quickly, as they were booking more artists and gathering more users daily. For the company's development team, building chat was outside of their expertise. Park elaborates, "at the time, most of our developers had come from government or healthcare backgrounds, so building a chat solution from the ground up would have taken far too long. Sendbird's out-of-the-box capabilities alone saved months of work."

Sendbird's advanced messaging features were also integral to KAVECON, such as announcements that alert users around the world of their favorite artists' performance schedules and meet and greets. 

Compared to other vendors, Sendbird provided real-time, seamless interactions that would delight KAVECON users, enabling an engaged, shared customer experience as close to a live show as possible, all from the comfort of their own homes.

Results

From purchase to implementation, KAVECON was able to go-live with Sendbird in only five days. Park exclaims, "Sendbird's API was extremely easy to use, and their team was very professional and responsive, supporting us almost immediately."

Furthermore, KAVECON's user base has grown 18 times in collaboration with Sendbird. Customers now have access to safe and reliable communication channels, with a user experience that has drastically improved compared to KAVECON's original launch. With Sendbird, chat is now seen as one of KAVECON's strengths versus competitors, who face much more latency and performance issues. "Providing fast and smooth messaging is one of our most important factors. Some vendors we spoke to could do 15-30 seconds latency. Two seconds is a high standard, and Sendbird surpasses this," says Park.

With these reasons contributing, the company has seen tremendous tangible revenue growth. Park explains that "from the end of 2020 to today, KAVECON has generated over 185% in year-over-year revenue growth, and we're only continuing to grow." 

As for the future, KAVECON is exploring community features that would allow users to deepen relationships not only between each other but also between fans and artists, such as the use of original fandom emojis, memes, and more. 

Partnering with Sendbird has helped KAVECON drive effective engagement and provide users with a comprehensive, shared experience, ultimately leading to significant growth for the company.

1) Since day one, Sendbird has partnered with AWS to establish itself as a leading conversations platform that enables a secure, global, and scalable in-app conversation experience. Sendbird is an AWS advanced tier technology partner operating 45+ AWS native services in 9 regions. Thanks to Amazon’s AWS Auto Scaling and Amazon Elastic Compute Cloud services, Sendbird manages massive digital traffic sending billions of messages monthly. Using Elastic Load Balancing and Amazon Route53 geolocation functions, Sendbird ensures reliable global traffic distribution. Sendbird also leverages AWS CloudFormation to automate its servers’ management in each region efficiently. Lastly, AWS Elasticache and Amazon Aurora allow Sendbird to achieve millisecond latency and data storage for over 300 million monthly active users. Sendbird’s world-class conversation platform architecture and technical foundations are certified by AWS.